Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition RICHARD AVEDON: Made in France, from November 1 through December 29, 2001.

This exhibition marks an important rediscovery of a small but central body of work in both Avedon’s career and in the history of twentieth century photography. The pictures, made in Paris for Harper’s Bazaar magazine during the 1950s, are the original engraver’s prints made by the legendary master printer André Gremela. The prints are uncropped, on their original mounts, and with the artist’s notations on both front and back. Thus, they provide a remarkable insight into the working methods of one of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers.

Richard Avedon was born in New York in 1923, and after studying photography at the New School during the late 1940s, spent twenty years as a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, creating many signature images that remain recognizable to this day. He has published many books including Portraits, Nothing Personal, Observations, and Evidence.

This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated hardcover catalogue, published by Fraenkel Gallery, and with an essay by Judith Thurman, staff writer for The New Yorker.

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The pictures, made in the 1960s, are of television screens housed in motel rooms and other rooms of anonymous character spread throughout the country. Each screen vividly transmits images of pop icons, political figures, or minor celebrities of the times. Walker Evans, writing about these photographs in a 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, called them “deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate.” The Little Screens documents not only iconographic ghost-rooms filled with bland furnishings of the period, they also reveal an emerging reality—the omnipresence of TV screens and the drone of television voices and personalities to fill space in an increasingly isolationist culture.

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Lee Friedlander’s distinguished career includes a MacArthur Foundation Award, three Guggenheim Fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published many other books, among them Self-Portrait, American Musicians, and The Desert Seen.

This exhibition is accompanied with a fully illustrated hardcover catalog, published by Fraenkel Gallery, and including a preface written by Walker Evans.

This exhibit runs concurrently with Diane Arbus: A Box of Ten Photographs and  Garry Winogrand: Public Relations.

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Public Relations is a distillation of a photographic project begun by Winogrand in 1969 when he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph what he called “the effect of media on events.” With his characteristic zeal, passion, spontaneity, and intensity, Winogrand photographed an array of public events including museum openings, press conferences, sports games and demonstrations. The photographs depict our emerging dependence on the media as well as how the media changes and sometimes even creates the event itself. In the catalog for the 1977 MoMA exhibition, Tod Papageorge wrote that what Winogrand “has given us in these photographs is a unilateral report of how we behaved under pressure during a time of costumes and causes, and of how extravagantly, outrageously, and continuously we displayed what we wanted.”

Garry Winogrand began photographing in 1948, when he was twenty. He received many major awards for his photography including a grant from the NEA and two Guggenheim fellowships. He died in 1984.

This exhibit runs concurrently with DIANE ARBUS: A Box of Ten Photographs and LEE FRIEDLANDER: The Little Screens.

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Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition A Box of Ten Photographs. This rare portfolio was one of the last projects Arbus was working on at the time of her death in 1971.

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A Box of Ten Photographs is comprised of ten images the artist felt best represented her photographic achievement. The images, many of which have come to be regarded as icons within the history of late twentieth-century photography, include Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967, A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, N.Y.C.,1966, Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C., 1967, and A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970.  At the time of Arbus’s death, she had completed only a small number of portfolios and had been able to sell no more than four complete sets (interestingly, among the few purchasers were Jasper Johns and Richard Avedon). Fraenkel Gallery recently acquired this specific set from the artist’s husband, Allan Arbus.

The exhibition runs concurrently with Lee Friedlander: The Little Screens and Garry Winogrand: Public Relations.

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Nicholas Nixon has long led a revival of interest in the large format  8 x 10 camera and contact printing, unencumbered by the traditional boundaries of this camera. For the last two decades he has photographed people, and produced pictures with a spontaneity and suppleness uncommon in large format camera photographs.

Nixon’s recent work is comprised of pictures of a diverse group of lovers, all previously unknown to Nixon. In some images, the lovers’ bodies are abstracted, transformed into shapes and curves. Here Nixon focuses on the many textures of skin, and the complicated composition of tangled limbs. Other images are more explicit, confronting viewers with their own conceptions of intimacy. As Peter Galassi writes in Nixon’s monograph Pictures of People, “Nicholas Nixon’s work of the past decade embraces the idea that sympathetic photographs of ordinary people can address the deepest of human values.”

Nixon has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as two Guggenheim Fellowships. His work is included in many important collections including: the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among others.

This exhibit runs concurrently with Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XIV.

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This year’s highlights include Paul Strand’s Bowls and Apples, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, a unique platinum investigation of Cubism from a high moment in early modernist photography; a series of Andy Warhol’s photo-booth studies of socialite and soon-to-be art dealer Holly Solomon from 1963-64; a large-scale study of the craters of the moon by French astronomers Loewy & Puiseux, circa 1900; an astonishing double-mammoth print study of the river boat “Nemo” near Ormond, Florida, circa 1895 by William Henry Jackson; and Carleton Watkins’ recently discovered four-part panorama of San Francisco made atop California Street in 1879.

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Also to be exhibited are recent photographs by Nan Goldin, Richard Misrach, and Lee Friedlander’s remarkable close-up studies of telemarketers at work.

Finally, the exhibition would not be complete without its own selection of eclectic, ragtag, and semi-loony images by unknown photographers.

This exhibit runs concurrently with Nicholas Nixon: Lovers.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto: Portraits is comprised of depictions of historic and contemporary figures, among them Elizabeth I, Napolean Bonaparte, Oscar Wilde, and Princess Diana. Larger than life and meticulously detailed, the photographs were made in various wax museums around the world, especially at Madame Tussaud’s in London. Isolated from their tableaus and photographed against an empty black background, the photographs call to question our relationship to history, each photograph residing in an ambiguous present. Like Sugimoto’s earlier bodies of work –the seascapes, dioramas, and theaters– the artist’s approach is serial and analytically consistent. The result allows the viewer to contemplate the ways in which photography is employed as a tool for recording both history and human nature.

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Time has always been an essential element within Sugimoto’s photographs: how we represent and understand it. In his work, Sugimoto investigates the layering of sources used to represent time past. He demonstrates that all representations are necessarily a blend of fiction and reality. In the Portraits, each life-sized interpretation depicts a ‘collapsing of time,’ as each wax figure is based upon an iconic work; sometimes a painting is the source, as with the portrait of Rembrandt van Rijn, and other times a photograph is used, as is the case with Karsh’s image of Winston Churchill. Ultimately Sugimoto makes his ‘portrait’ of each wax figure, such that the final image is necessarily an amalgam of its predecessors.

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In the late 1960s, when figurative representation was commonly considered finished, Close made it his launching pad for a lifetime of artistic exploration, proving through the ensuing decades that the subject was far from exhausted. Beginning with intimate images of self and family, he problematized the idea of the portrait, each subject and its representation posing a new set of questions. Close’s approach is nuanced, literally, a method of focusing in on each detail of the face and describing each with exquisite precision. The result, an amalgam of innumerable closely-observed parts, places these images neatly between abstraction and mirrored likeness, both detached and intimate. This method of rendering becomes particularly fascinating when the subject scrutinized is Close himself.

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The works on view vary widely, both in process and scale, from a 10 x 8 inch contact sheet to a recent gargantuan 88 x 68 inch digital inkjet print. Close approaches each medium with great elasticity. Here his sense of depth and range is likewise apparent; within photography, for example, he has explored every medium from traditional gelatin-silver printing, to Polaroids, holograms, and daguerreotypes. By using all the means to which he has access, Close has spent over three decades pushing representation to its furthest limits.

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As it has from the beginning, this new work by Fuss deals with issues of life and death, birth, love and its loss. One gets the sense from Fuss’s work that he does not try to direct or manipulate these subjects which are, by their nature, ambiguous. Rather, he resolves himself to the their inherent mystery. This is largely accomplished through Fuss’s photographic method which hinges on chance occurrence. In the case of his photograms, which will be on view, the enigma of smoke is stilled and recorded directly on paper by a flash of light. These photographs each convey their subject in a different way; some with articulate edges and defined shapes, others with a hazy, translucent airiness.

Fuss also recovers the 19^th century daguerreotype process in his work. Using this form, which was largely used historically for portraiture, he portrays disparate subject matter, focusing on five main topics: the body of a swan with wings extended, images of the poems of Tarkovsky (whose work has been of great import to Fuss), baptism dresses, butterflies, and self-portraits. Fuss’s daguerreotype work is illustrated in a recent monograph by the same name, My Ghost.

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